Italy’s The Silver Snails are a pop rock band having released their full-length debut album, The 7 Melodies, featuring eight tracks. The band is comprised of lead singer, Lucas Ward and his wife Elisa Fantini, and both take inspiration from the family’s rustic backdrop in the wine country of Romagna, Italy, and combine it with their contemporary sound that attracts a global audience.

Songs on The 7 Melodies, the group’s ambitious, harmonically rich debut album, are sung in English, French, Italian, Mandarin, and even a bit of Sanskrit. Their influences include The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, David Bowie, Pink Floyd and other British musicians that are reflective throughout their music. Other influences include Beethoven, Irish, jazz and many other diverse genres.

The Silver Snails are exclusively premiering their new single “Beatrice Russo,” and Ward shares with our audience about the single below:

“Though complex and multi-layered underneath, “Beatrice Russo” is meant to be sweet and accessible to the listener. The complexity starts with the harmony. The song calls for chords moving every bar the whole song, over a completely original chord cycle in two parts (AB) modulated up a half-step (A’B’) and then repeated a third time in the original key. In reality the song doesn’t have a ‘key’ in the traditional sense, it simply has starting points and end-points and a precise sequence of chords based around chromatically descending bass-lines.

The chromatic descending bass thing I identify most closely with Jobim (e.g. ‘Corcovado’) but others have used it to give a sense harmonic momentum. At the same time, I wanted to create melodies which sound accessible and ‘tonal’ over this constantly moving, a-tonal chord train. Finally, I wanted to create separate ‘male’ and ‘female’ melodies which both interact in duet fashion as well as solo (for example the female takes the lead and with new melody during the middle A’B’ section). In addition, since the theme of the song is ‘impossible love’, a là Romeo & Juliet, I decided to make it an international love story, with my male lead in English and the female lead sung by Elisa in Italian.

A muse for the song was the film “Il Postino,” in which Pablo Neruda’s postman (Massimo Troisi) is inspired by his crush on a girl from his village (Maria Cucinotta) to compose his first ‘metaphor’. When pressed by the great poet to confess the name of his muse, it rolls off his tongue like fresh molasses: ‘Beatrice… Russo… ‘. We note that Beatrice was also the name of Dante’s love and muse (his avataric guide in ‘The Divine Comedy’ was Virgilio…

Though composed on the piano, “Beatrice Russo” is guitar-driven using 8th note picking-style comp. The song also features real drums and lush analog (‘real’) strings which recorded in Sarsina, Italy, along with all the other studio tracks.”

Atlanta based musician Danny Brewer, musically known as Besides Daniel, uses poetic lyricism, emotive lyricism and catharsis in his music. Besides Daniel pulls from his own life lessons and experiences to write his songs, and his previous release, The Marvelous Grief, was featured on NPR, Starbucks and NBC’s Heartbeat. His new album, TEEMING, will release on Aug. 24, 2018, and a recent press release states that “this collection of songs humbly puts into perspective the weight of life lessons, true friendship, the risks of marriage and the triumph of a heart that has healed.” TEEMING was self-produced and recorded by Matt Pethel of Grey Echo Productions just outside of Atlanta.

Besides Daniel exclusively teamed up with us to premiere his new single “Long Shot,” which can be streamed below:

When asked to describe “Long Shot,” Brewer shares with Talent In Borders that the song “recounts the season of restlessness and adventure that I experienced when I traveled by bicycle over 3000 miles-living on the bike and sleeping in a hammock for almost 3 months.”

He continues explaining that “the refrain of “I am your long shot, You are my sure win” refers to coming to terms with the risks in choosing to love. “I was a risky bet, but she took a long shot”. You can hear the experiences in the lyrics.”